Improv “Ringtone” Bruce Bond

A live bird gone still,
poised for attack of some prey, some bug
or worm, or other bird.
The meeting of strangers, an echo
of the future, awaking birds
and sending them flitting to tree branches, waiting
for the storm of words to pass.

Improv “Peal” Bruce Bond

You want what you can’t have, but choose not to fight
for it. I wonder why you tell someone you miss me-who I used to be, the walks down the unpaved roads and into the forest behind the gym, but can’t tell me. Guys
will be guys- stone walled creatures with hard hearts
and bad backs, but you know you could talk to me.
No one will hear you now.
It’s a phone ringing and ringing and ringing.

Improv “A Diet of Angels” Bruce Bond

Somewhere is a word to bury the words between us.
Words unused and hidden
out of fear of judgement from my father and your mother,
out of anger of something unable to be spoken
apparently, but its a vocabulary you and I don’t have access to.
Somehow is a word to unearth the words somewhere buries.
But someone kills them.

Improv “Homage to the Ear” Bruce Bond

Before words, before hunger took the shape of words,
there were grunts.
Before spoons, before forks became spoons,
there were hands.
Before cars, before a bike smacked a motor to it and called it a car,
people walked.
That’s how I met you- walking down the street, eating a New York hotdog
with your hands, grunting at how delicious the sandwich was- I hope.
Your words turned into something I slurped up like what you did with
a spoon and I used your car as a way to transport those words.
Before you,
there was no action.

Improv “Elysium” Bruce Bond

Your heart the size of two fists, says Cho to Jack.
What? turning to look at the half Chinese, half Mexican boy with terrible grammar.
Standing, your heart is no different from anyone's, but sitting
makes it double. Jack laughs and Cho frowns.
What writhing fish would do for a heart-
a good one.

Improv “Human share” Bruce Bond

The lightened fog of breathing slips
down past sleep into a land of comatose.
Everything is weightless here: dreams of pandas tap-dancing
float past the old man walking with his granddaughter.
Age five, we know nothing of real life. Only what mommy and daddy
tell about Santa and the Tooth Fairy. It cannot be terrible out there. Not
with a fat suited beard and a tiny winged woman who bring toys and money,
respectively.
Its mommy and daddy who hold these jobs too. Working overtime
to keep up happy. We’ll laugh and smile...
a job well done.

Improv “Scar” Bruce Bond

One day you’ll meet my mother.
She’s a sweet lady with an obsession for
heavy metal rock bands.
She cooks apple pie as she plays Black Sabbath,
showers to AC/DC, and sleeps with Metallica
as her alarm clock.
Gardening contains a mix of Motorhead, Megadeath
and Iron Maiden among peonies, cucumbers and
basil. Judas Priest naps on the television, while Jeopardy
plays on, and she shouts out the answers.
She knows nothing of Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake or Usher.
Nikki Minaj and Jay-Z are unbeknownst to her.
She’s been part of the blind color of too much light-
from early concerts in a youth where they knew only how to
rock.

Improv “Ash” Bruce Bond

Its odd white weight crushed any life from before,
and cut off the hope of spring. That is, until the warmth returns
and the weight is removed, replaced with the heat of the sun
or blade of the cutter, pressing its own environmental power
upon what came earlier. The flowers Judy planted in July were dead
by August, and the mulch lost color by November,
frosting in October cut off circulation and even squirrels
had dissipated by September. Come February, God willing,
we will be free to plant new lives and new gardens
in hopes to do this all again come fall.

Improv “Gorecki” Bruce Bond

Rising and falling, rising and falling, your breath
in sync with mine. I shudder to think,
one day you won’t be here
lying next to me, smirking in your sleep,
little puffs of something fluff the sheets
just barely. But enough that I giggle.
We giggle together when we watch Late Night. A moment
when Leno and Conen show us something funny about that day,
and we missed it.

Improv “The Black Bear at Closing” Corey Marks

We wait long enough and curiosity becomes trespass,
timidly kicking the door into the wall holding a baseball bat and calling out the typical phrases, hearing the expected silence. Silence is golden- not now. Its now the silence is louder than Becky’s outfit-blinding the bus driver with sequins and clashing patterns.
I wanted to tell the skirt to shut up,
but I would look silly talking to a skirt.

Improv “Semper Augustus” Corey Marks

She imagined she could wait for color to craze the petals, going from white to red.
She imagined, but couldn’t wait for a color craze, petals of sweat dripped as she colored from red to white, fazing from waiting to doing- unimagined.
She fondled the petals, glazing her eyes from color to color, imagining
the garden- unable to wait again.

Improv “The Empty Theater” Corey Marks

I was alone fending for myself in a town where a total of six
people knew my name. Four were bartenders. The other two worked at the movie theater
in town. No good Oscar winners at that place-only foreign and half priced silent films from the forties. My mother came to visit and asked what I did for fun.
I took her over to Harvey’s for a shot of Crowne Maple and to a screening of The Great Dictator.
She laughed until she peed. I never understood what was so funny.
The seat hit the back cushion as I left the already empty theater halfway through the movie, flicking my lighter as mom came out. Why are we leaving early? met a shrug and tossed keys
as rain started to pour.

Improv “Loss” Corey Marks

We stand, clad in black, except for Uncle Vic
who wears yellow, over the place they tore up Mother
Nature to put the wooden bed for you. Jimmy sobs on my shoulder,
but I stone face the granite boulder with your name, his brother,
this isn’t where the dead go.
It’s not the way- to close up the earth and put a few flowers down,
how do you get out? How does your soul get free?
This isn’t where the dead go.
The dead go bowling with everyone they’ve missed, or sit around catching up
on the years- not left alone in a mahogany box, or scattered along the beach to mix into the ocean breeze or fed to a clown-fish.
This isn’t where the dead go.

Improv “Three Bridges” Corey Marks

The bed squishes and creaks under the weight
you didn’t add- the one missing
thing missing everywhere in this house. No pictures,
no smells of unknown leftovers, no socks lying in the middle of the floor
or behind the dryer. I only have the last memory of you- the last action
before you ducked into the car, toted away from me
forever.
I’ll never lay an eye on you, or a hand, and neither
you will me. My house is missing a piece of you,
but I’ll always carry the remnant of you in my scar
on my side. The scalpel wound, where I was sliced open to be given
your kidney and lay in wait for the day the scar tissue will close up
and melt away, and become itself again.

Improv “Radio Tree” Corey Marks

Strings of sound:
that tied and untied and unraveled into silence,
called into a sentence for once. Comprehended by none but the knitters.
The ones who weave pieces into projects- art on display for all
to see the ball of words,
knit one, pearl two,
a pattern-web of action and reaction physically combined.
A chemist of sorts-nucleotides and bonds straining
at environmental hazards, praying to make it one more day.
Prayers are mutterings about a frayed noise over the silence of the day
today to God who hears the unfinished

Improv “House with a Bed of Tulips” Corey Marks

What do we fill a lack,
that for a time, was all that called us home
with? A lack of hope that tomorrow will be waiting with more green
than gray, filled only with colors from a paint can, and a Chia pet.
A gray stone that grows green hair and sings Chi Chi Chi Chia Obama,
or something tacky like that.

Tacky glue covers the walls, holding up pictures of you and I, smiling
like a duck at a pond in the summer, filtered in green. Not the Fanny-May mint, but
the forest-cover-up-every-other-color-in-the-picture- green: trying to fade left from black
and white.

No in between gray zone where everyone tiptoes like Imagine Dragons or Neon Trees. Everybody talks, but it starts with a whisper- a ring around the question at hand. A hand holds up the shh finger whenever asked.

What’s the point then? To ask a question? Posterity or sentimentality,
I guess. Postasentimentality Sir William Shakespeare.
The only thing keeping me home.

Improv “Miguel Hernandez, Madrid 1934” Corey Marks

Before she sang of what was older and pulled a clump of weeds from the garden, before she pushed a younger version of herself clad in overalls and one striped sock, down the street in a stroller,

Before he brought a polka dot tie as a white elephant gift for the Christmas Party at New York’s biggest law firm, before he ever saw the first snowflake of December,

She was a waitress. Calmly frazzled, waiting for the future
to not be found in the pancake batter and orange juice from last Sunday. He was in a booth, poked with holes from a child stabbing knives into the plastic and cutting food with crayons.

Their eyes would meet for a second. She would look at his blue questions about extra syrup and a side of salsa, and she would hurry off, slipping on a puddle of milk or apple juice, catching his grin.

He was consumed with her, not the feast of chocolate chips. The way her shoes squeaked on the tile, the way she brushed her hair back and showed the black mark of year long
sweating. But once the bill came, and the name inked,

She entered the kitchen and he entered the lot.
Before acknowledging their futures at all.

Improv “After the Shipwreck” Corey Marks

Love is something that can never be written
perfectly. Its something that will never be etched by a wordsmith
because its related to moons, rainbows and wine. Not arguments at four a.m. because baby cries on the monitor, or dinner lies cold on the table because he’s forty-five minutes late and no one calls. Apparently that’s not love. Love is holding out a ring- a symbol of unknown
that will bring up thoughts of Gollum and the One Ring. My Precious: not the day, twenty four years down the crimson velvet of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, where you stand in line, returning
what was never ours.

Improv "At Seven" Corey Marks

I’ll tell you what childhood was like:
a medicine that tasted like berries.
Strawberries, that grew on a vine outside Grandma’s mountain home.
The only growing that could be eaten. She would mash them
into pie juice to be poured into a crust and placed on a shelf,
only to be eaten by the dog late at night.
Medicine never tasted like pies though, only the pain of stomach contents
rushing back through to your mouth, tongue flicking back and forth
between rows of teeth, fighting bile. Grandma also knew how to ease that aftertaste:
pie.